She inched closer. “You should have asked us. Why didn’t you?”
He hesitated. “You’ve been…isolated for so long. Become primitive. We didn’t think you’d understand the scope of the decision.”
It was as she’d thought. Aoife bent forward and slit his throat with her small eating knife. He burbled and fell still.
The house hummed in surprise but didn’t intervene.
Aoife crept among the sleeping men and cut all their throats, even the one that was a woman.
For Biri. For her sad, lonely house.
For all these cautious grown-up women. Someone needed to make the hard decisions.
Sin Nombre
Jennifer Rachel Baumer
“It’s me,” CJ told the scanner, so tired she couldn’t focus on the machine’s inability to distinguish all the ‘me’s in the building or the fact that, if the building did know who she was, it probably wouldn’t let her in.
She hadn’t observed any of the protocols. What was the point? Constantly washing, standing under sprayers, being scrubbed down in her suit, out of her suit, in her skivvies – she no longer had any residual embarrassment, just thick exhaustion that made her eyes burn and made the suit heavier than ever.
Bio-level 4. In a city. It wasn’t possible to contain everything. The human population hadn’t been sent away because there was no away to go to. So she worked around them, pretending a barrier existed between her potential as a vector and their potential as victims.
The west coast virus carried a 50 percent kill rate. It hadn’t been identified as aerosolized yet; that made stupid people overconfident and overconfident people even more stupid.
It made Dr. Cynthia Jones tired.
She finally remembered just to thump the scanner with her fist, the way her stepson showed her. The stupid thing responded to violence and so did the scanner. No, no, she wasn’t going to think like that anymore. Kev was Kyle’s son and she loved Kyle. She slugged the scanner, which blinked. The door to the downtown Reno once-luxury condominiums slid open grudgingly about six inches. CJ stuck her hand in and shoved it all the way open.
The elevator was down. She didn’t know why she even tried it anymore. If it ever sent a car and opened to her, she’d run in terror. Anyway, power had been iffy ever since everything went to hell and everyone started to die. Ever since the lights appeared in the summer evening skies, moving too fast for the fastest military jet to intercept.
Everything was weird and iffy and wrong, and everyone still alive was busy learning new skills.
Kyle had designed the reconversion of the downtown casino to condos they now inhabited as the virus crisis went on and on. They’d taken the penthouse. Twenty stories up. CJ took a breath, realized she still wore her hood and face mask, and was too tired to take them off. She clumped up the stairs in her spacesuit and stood staring at the front door until she had the energy to enter. Nothing would ever make her admit it, but it had been pleasant when Kev had run away at the start of the crisis. A lot of teenagers had, run away and come home days later. The news reported it all with a kind of world-weary cynicism, a kind of ‘and in addition to everything else, this is just what we needed’ attitude. The trend had passed.
CJ let herself into the condo.
“Ahh, the crusader, home from the holy war.”
“Give it a rest, Kev,” Kyle said without looking up from his laptop and then, catching sight of her when he did, “You’re still suited.”
CJ touched the mike at her throat. “Thought I’d save time. Sleep in it. For the few hours I have.”
“Too tired to get out?”
“Couldn’t get the back zipper and there were no cute guys to assist me.”
“The cute guys are all dead,” Kyle said. “The zipper is on the front. And it’s Velcro. You wanted me to do it. Come here.”
Kev made a loud retching sound and slammed out of the apartment.
“He forgot his respirator,” CJ said, staring at the door.
“He’ll be all right. It’s calming down and no one knows for sure it’s airborne.”
“Is that enough for you?”
He didn’t answer right away. No one knew how the contagion spread, only the results. But it started in the East, along with the lights in the night sky. So people fled West, until the new strain started. Suits were now more to protect anyone who might be able to find a cure than anything else.
Anything could be lurking on her suit.
“Has to be enough, doesn’t it?” he said.
* * *
The man on the table might be forty. Virile, dark, once-handsome. The man on the table was in his forties, virile, dark, covered in blood. Blood jetted from his nose and mouth. Blood leaked from his ears, ran down his face in streams from burst capillaries. Blood-red eyes rolled as he thrashed, blind, terrified and screaming. Hands reached to pull him down. Restraints clicked around his wrists. Someone wound towels around his hands so he wouldn’t scratch anyone. Seizures bent him. Medics shouted for vaccines, IV liquids, anything. Blood streamed as the patient twisted and dropped back to the table.
CJ shot up from sleep. “No one is bleeding out.”
Beside her Kyle stirred in the pre-dawn grayness. “You’re exhausted. Try to sleep.”
He was too. Even architects were hard-pressed, redesigning quick fixes to turn every empty house into multifamily homes for refugees. Or into triage units. Into quarantine facilities and level 4 bio safety labs. Into morgues.
Just like veterinarians could be pressed into service in a hot zone.
“I was dreaming,” she said and stared at her hands in the dim light of the bedroom. In the dream her hands had been covered in blood.
“You were dreaming about the Midwest.”
She made a face. “I was dreaming about a guy –”
“I know.”
“It’s not Ebola, Lassa, a known hemorrhagic fever. I’m not that kind of a doctor and people keep dying, but they’re not bleeding and it’s not Hanta and it’s not –”
“It’s not morning. You get to sleep a while longer. I love you.”
“How do I sleep?”
He rolled her over onto her side and put his arms around her. “You close your eyes and you just do. Because you can’t help anyone this way. The crisis is over.”
She started to respond, but he was exhausted too. He’d been asleep. She’d said it all before.
She squeezed his arms where they crossed around her and listened to him slide back to sleep, and thought what she would have said.
The crisis is just getting started. Eighty percent along the eastern seaboard. Fifty to seventy percent throughout the Midwest. And whatever this is throughout the west where everyone came because there was no HF. They came here to breathe and I think breathing is killing them.
Your son, she might have continued, is out there protesting in favor of the viruses. One more of the New Lifers, the Viruses Have Rights contingency. Only this time the fruitcakes can kill us. All they need to do is make friends with the enemy and it will travel through the world at the speed of light.
But she didn’t think it. She slept.
* * *
In the morning there were more bodies in the Northern Nevada valleys. CJ didn’t want to see them. The director of the crisis team was excited.
“A family.” He seemed unaware he was talking about their deaths. He’d peered too long into the mystery. “You need to go to Wadsworth.”
You know I’m a veterinarian, right? She had never meant to work with humans.
That kind of responsibility, being the hope of dying people, it made her unable to remember a damned thing.
But too many people had died this summer.
The summer the lights came.
…Why did she always think of both things? Virus and lights. She was as bad a
s the New Lifers.
On the drive along I-80 she saw a herd of wild horses. The temperature was already rising and the world smelled of sage.
And smoke, from funerary fires. Illegal and insane while the virus was unknown, but how could you stop people from honoring their dead? Wadsworth appeared, a wide spot in the road. She hadn’t been given directions. She couldn’t miss it. True. Ambulance, helicopter, EMTs and sheriff’s deputies surrounded an angry family that didn’t want to let their loved ones go. The small, paint-peeling house was the scene of the only action in Wadsworth aside from a ruffled crow the size of a cat tearing at something in an oil-sheened puddle at the edge of the road. As CJ drove past she saw the crow clutched a wriggling, white-bellied mouse in one talon and she shuddered.
Ubiquitous protestors. Of course. Just beyond range of anyone wanting to throw something at them, or arrest them under the new laws for interfering with medics. They carried poorly or creatively spelled signs about the right of all life. They themselves might be breeding new life; none of them looked particularly clean. The signs claimed viruses had a right to life.
Viruses can do good.
…No.
What about medically designed smart viruses?
Not the same thing.
Viruses know how to PARTY.
CJ didn’t know what to make of that one. She scanned the group to make certain Kev wasn’t there and got out of the car.
“You a relative?” one of the deputies asked.
“I’m a – doctor,” she said, and held up her kit with mask, gloves and coat, and tried not to hope this was the time the officer would say, No, you aren’t, you’re an imposter, and refuse her entry.
He didn’t.
The interior was shadowy and stuffy, even with the windows open. If whatever had killed them was airborne, it was already released into the world.
No one went in with her. As if they were safer outside in the scrub grass front yard. The ambulance waited to transport bodies. The helicopter pilot smoked a cigarette. The sheriff’s deputies repeated, “We’re sorry for your loss. Please move back behind the yellow tape. You’ll be notified when you can claim the bodies.”
CJ forced herself over the threshold.
The family lay inside the cramped living room, the only things out of place in an otherwise spotless dark space.
They’d died without fanfare, probably within minutes of each other. CJ thought the teenaged girls died last; both had fallen while reaching out to their parents, who lay slumped together on the couch. Even in the shadowy living room she could see their faces were cyanotic. They’d suffocated in a room full of air.
Outside, the protestors shouted.
Yes, CJ thought. Viruses are alive. There are smart viruses. Created to penetrate and consume unhealthy cells. Before theoretically they themselves die. And we know everything always goes according to plan.
But this doesn’t seem like anything of ours.
They called it Sin Nombre. Without name. Not without suffering. Victims died of pulmonary failure, lungs filled with fluid, drowning in the hot, dry desert air. It was a hantavirus, rodent-borne and aerosolized, and it thrived in conditions like this – dry, hot, full of mice.
In 1993, the Four Corners outbreak showed more cases in clean homes than in those that weren’t. People in clean homes swept, disturbing dust and dirt impregnated with rodent droppings and urine. The carrier was the white-bellied deer mouse, cute, friendly, fond of people and their food.
Which told her nothing. Time after time the virus was stained and observed. Each time it resisted becoming anything anyone could understand. If it was hanta, it was a new strain. If it was Sin Nombre, the unnamed virus from the 90s, it was a strain. CDC, USAMRIID, state and county public health, veterinarians pulled into service – everyone left alive was working together.
And a lot of them weren’t. Alive. Early on they just used masks and goggles. Later they moved to bio safety level 4 labs. Negative pressure labs. Full spacesuits. Nothing worked – researchers died.
Viruses always searched for hosts. Just not like this. This seemed intentional.
In the dim stillness of the living room, edge of vision, CJ saw something move. “You’re getting jumpy.”
Past the family on the couch, across the dining room, a lace-covered window showed patches of desert-empty backyard. Maybe she saw a bird out there, or an EMT. Or a bereaved family member trying to break in.
Or more of the lights in the sky, the ones that showed up just before the heat wave. Whatever. She was here for samples. CJ knelt, gathering her swabs and hypos, the log she needed to fill out. It seemed likely the virus couldn’t be identified because it was mutating so quickly, jumping from form to form and host to host. Samples meant… – Something in the living room moved. On the couch. Like…the father.
CJ’s heart hammered. She stayed still, scalpel in hand, watching the bodies.
That was when one of the girls on the floor moved, hand scrabbling on the carpet as if to pull herself closer to her parents.
CJ screamed. She ran for the door before she understood. They’d made a mistake. Not everyone in the family was dead. They’d checked the others, not the girl. Made an assumption. Been too afraid, desperate to get out. The fear of contagion did that.
She bolted anyway. Paramedics were equipped for the living. CJ had tools for the dead. She managed a professional front, walking the instant she was outside, over to the knot of officials watching the house, avoiding the cameras and eyes of those outside it and the furious words of the bereaved family.
“They’re not dead,” she told the first paramedic she reached.
“What?”
“Alive. At least one is. She – moved. You need to go in there.”
He looked at her, wide-eyed and disbelieving. Unwilling. She couldn’t blame him.
“Please. Just go in there.”
She turned her back to the house. She’d left her gear inside and held only a roll of gauze. An EMT came over and bagged it, traded her for a paper cup of coffee in her gloved hands. It felt wonderful despite the gathering warmth of the morning. She faced west, watching the mountains, until slowly her attention moved from the Sierra to the treetops to the knot of protestors in the street. Young, punky, death-positive, carrying signs. One of them read ‘REV-olution.’ That made no sense. The next read ‘R-EVOLUTION.’ She frowned, and read in no particular order.
‘Evolve and die.’
‘Bottoms up, food chain.’
‘The ones left behind are always afraid.’
‘Only human arrogance states only humans have right to life.’
Right to life. Kev believed that, if he didn’t just use it to get under her skin. Right to life for everything.
She thought of the family inside, parents drowning, girls reaching, left alone because everyone was too afraid.
She thought of thousands in the East and across the heartlands, bleeding out from arenavirus, identifiable and still unstoppable.
Right to life. This wasn’t a game for children, racing across the world to protest at every tragedy, holding signs that spouted nonsense.
Rage gathered. CJ balled her fists and started forward. Instantly the EMT barred her path. “Not worth it,” he said. He redirected her, hands on her shoulders. “Sit. Have you eaten today? We’ve got some protein bars.”
She focused. “No. Thanks. Sorry.”
“Nah. They’re a pain. Like it’s a game. Like they’re immortal. Like their signs are counterculture and shocking.”
She met his eyes. He was older than she was. Older than most EMTs, a fine net of crows’ feet beside greenish eyes. “What do you think?”
“I think they might be right.”
Right about what, she wanted to ask, but before she could, the other medic came out of the house, shaking his head. One hand went to h
is throat, checked its own movement, and shoved his hair back instead. He came over to where CJ sat on the back of the ambulance, cradling the coffee.
“They’re dead,” and before she could say anything, “but it’s creepy in there. I don’t wonder you thought you saw someone move. Did you get what you needed or do you need to do more? I’d like to bag-and-tag.”
She swallowed hard at that. He accepted her as a fellow professional. That’s what was done with bodies beyond the reach of antibiotics or immune serum.
“I’ll get my samples,” she said, and handed him the cup.
* * *
The family lay in the same positions. She’d expected them to have been moved. It wasn’t a crime scene; someone could have moved them into less traumatic positions.
Like who? There had only been CJ, and the first responder, already out again, and the EMT, who clearly had wanted out.
And there were changes. She saw one girl’s hand was moved. Maybe he checked her pulse, then laid her arm back down awkwardly beside her body. CJ didn’t feel braver, but she herself had done more.
Maybe it was too overwhelming for everyone. Maybe when it was all over she’d have a nice, long breakdown. Meanwhile, she needed blood, saliva and hair. Probably. No telling what she’d want to look at, since nothing ever revealed a damn thing anyway.
She still wanted to apologize when she drew blood, but that was silly. She could poke around as long as she wanted for the mother’s veins and no one would ever –
“I think she’s dead,” a voice behind her said.
CJ jerked, hands flying. The needle jabbed through the dead woman’s arm, through thin tissue and out the other side, missing her left index finger by the width of the needle itself. She felt it slide by. She did not feel a short, sharp pain. She was saved the 30-second decision of whether to cut off her own finger or risk invasion by the virus.
The voice was a girl’s.
The girl was sitting up behind her, looking on curiously.
“I’m – are you –” CJ gave up and just stared.
The girl was maybe 14, Kev’s age. Black hair, roundish face, still a little baby fat. Pretty. And dead. “Are you –” she tried again.
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